Resurrection Dreaming

We don’t know what went wrong. The record is sparse and legends abound. But it was something with which we can all identify at one time or another in our lives … being in a situation and wishing we were somewhere else.

Abraham, living in the city of Ur, found himself where he did not belong. Perhaps it was true that his father sold idols and Abraham found it repugnant. Whatever it was, it ran against everything that he believed in.

So he struck out across an unknown desert, from one unpredictable water hole to the next, muttering something about a "Promised Land." He took everything he owned and left his old world behind. His family and relatives followed … some perhaps believing in his strange vision, some convinced that he didn’t know where he was going.

Because of this bold gamble, Abraham became the founder of three of the world’s great religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We can look back and admire this leap of faith. But at the time, I’m sure each day seemed very precarious.

I sense that it was similar for slaves, marching in the mud, pushing straw down with their feet to mix it well, so they could make mud bricks. And here came this gentleman from up north, talking about a land flowing with milk and honey – it was a ‘pretty’ sounding dream.

He looked familiar, but he was ever so strange. And what he talked about called up a distant memory. For these were slaves in Egypt who had been there for 400 years. Moses was talking about their homeland.

The story of Moses is told every year around the Seder meal. The people were enslaved. They cried out to God. Moses brought to them the four-letter name of the Lord God, and with that name, Moses challenged the powers of Pharaoh until he relented.

The people pulled up stakes, took what they owned and struck out over the desert. They followed this man who kept describing a land flowing with milk and honey. Some perhaps believed in the vision. Most complained.

We see this vision-renewing pattern in the story of the exile. By volume, the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the "Old Testament," has more pages devoted to the exile than anything else. This was the real crisis-time in Hebrew history, and the formative period for Jewish scripture. So never again will Israel fall into such malady, they sat about compiling their memories and refining their rituals.

• David was the paradigm-setting king, the prototype of the messiah. O for a king like David! So Israel, God’s own kingdom, might be strong again.

• King Solomon built on David’s foundation and established a mighty empire. He built the temple and ushered in what is known as the "First Temple Period."

• But then internal conflict began … first between Solomon’s two sons. The Northern Kingdom, ten tribes split from the Southern Kingdom, two tribes. Some rulers were good. Others corrupt. The prophets warned them. The tribes of Israel became progressively worse, falling away from God and the righteousness that puts one in accord with God.

• First the Assyrians overpowered the Northern Kingdom. They uprooted families and deported captives. These became the proverbial "Lost Tribes of Israel."

• Then the Babylonians overpowered the Southern Kingdom. They uprooted families and deported captives. These were the ones destined to return after 400 years.

• The Jews left in the land intermarried with the Canaanites and became the Samaritans we find in the New Testament. They are the Palestinians that we know today.

• Ezra and Nehemiah, followed not far behind by the prophet Malachi, in accordance with the visions set forth by the other prophets, brought the exiles back home. They rebuilt the temple, and the wall, and their homes. Thus began the so-called "Second Temple Period."

The whole story of exile carries the same, vision-inspired "resurrection" paradigm. The reversal-of-fortunes theme found throughout the Bible. How God leads us from our problematic circumstances to new life or as Revelation says: a New Heaven and a New Earth, a New Jerusalem.

Everything in Christianity comes down to "resurrection." The cross is not what it’s about. Communion only points. Resurrection! Underlying import. Core message. Resurrection!                                                                                              [TOP]                    

Christianity underscores an idea that has lived throughout Jewish history.

• No matter what your crisis or my crisis,

• No matter what the problem or how hopeless the universe,

• No matter how badly the vase is shattered,

• The primary activity of God in our lives is RESURRECTION, RECREATION, and RENEWAL.

The question for this morning is: what makes a resurrection work? What leads us through the Valley of the Death’s Shadow into New Life? What is the key ingredient that enables change for the better?

And the answer is: Our DREAMS. Our VISIONS. Along with our sense of expectancy.

• For Abraham, it was his dream of a Promised Land.

• For Moses, it was his vision of a land flowing with Milk and Honey.

• For people in Exile, it was the prophets keeping alive, for four hundred years, the vision of going back home.

"I see a valley filled with dry bones. Dead bones. But them bones gonna start rattlin’, and they will take on flesh, and they will dance again."

"The mountains that are in the way will be made low, and the valleys so hard to cross will be raised up, and God will make a straight highway across the desert, all the way back home."

These are images, pictures, symbolic representation of realities to come.

ALL CREATIVE CHANGE IS PRECEDED BY DREAMS, VISIONS, AND MENTAL IMAGES. And the key of prayer is to enable dreaming, envisioning, imagination. And then, meditatively, to rest quietly in the expectation of the outcome.

Dreaming, as a specific prelude to change, is found throughout scriptures: In the Hebrew Bible, Joseph foresaw the future in dreams. It was by the power of dreams that he rose from a family outcast, slavery, betrayal, imprisonment … to the salvation of Egypt and his people.

Jacob, who became Israel, was shaped by two visions: A ladder going up to heaven, an image that depicts the spiritual ascent. And his wrestling with the angel. Jacob was a shrewd man, a bit of a cheat … and he had to wrestle with some issues before taking on a more holy name.

Elijah rose to heaven in a chariot. A powerful vision! Ezekiel’s saw the wheels in the middle of the wheels, and the four animals, and the four levels of heaven. These two visions formed the basis of the Merkabah, and later the Kabbalah … the Chariot-Vision and Tree-of-Life approach to Jewish mysticism.

Joseph, in the New Testament, was a dreamer. In Matthew’s gospel, in the birth stories of Jesus, six different times did dreams enter the picture and directly change the course of events.                                                                                                  [TOP]

I came across a good book this last week on dreaming. It’s entitled, "Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming," and it’s about awakening the visionary life . . . . [Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming, by Catherine Shainberg] From a specific and ancient Kabbalah tradition dating back to the 13^th century. This book goes into depth about the power of the IMAGES that we hold in our minds. The image is what draws into our life events and situations from the vast field of possibility that surrounds us.

Life literally evolves according to the images we entertain in our minds. It seems that there are two kinds of activities going on in our brains. From the left brain, we have this stream of thoughts. From the time we get up in the morning to the time we go to bed at night, we are thinking about something. From the right brain, we have a stream of images, going on all the time. It’s just that we are not as aware of it.

• Left brain thoughts attune mostly to the outside world through our senses.

• Right brain images attune mostly to our inner life, our inner reactions. And more importantly, to the vast field of possibilities – quantum potentials – that swim like fish in the ocean of our Collective Sub-Consciousness. The Kabbalah trick is learning to discern those images that come from our inner wishes from those that come from beyond and which deal with larger realities – our destiny in the universe.

The Hebrew letter mem, "m" means water. "Nun," "n," represents "fish." In my reading, Water and Fish are symbols for our Collective Sub-Consciousness and its contents.

Correspondingly, the Aramaic word for "prayer" means "laying a trap." It’s like how they used to catch catfish in the Missouri Ozarks. They’d take an empty, plastic gallon jug; tie to it a string with bait on a weighted hook. And they’d just leave it there, in the water.

There were many arguments about what bait worked best. But generally, the worse it smelled, the better it worked. Fishermen would just sit on the bank with a piece of straw in their mouths and wait. When the jug moved, they had a catfish.

Faith, and the prayer of faith, is this kind of visionary expectation. With dreams, visions for bait, we lay our expectations before God. We in turn receive (KaBAL) from God visions and images of promise. And we wait, and resurrection comes.

When Connie and I were first married, we adopted a stray calico cat we named Stitches. Stitches had been with us through all our marriage crises … buying a home, setting up housekeeping, stepchildren, moving. It was a real loss when Stitches died, and we sought to replace her. That was our first lesson. You can never replace something. You always end up with something new. We now have two cats: Sufi and Cotton. Neither cat is humble and devoted like Stitches. Both are spoiled.

When we shave or brush our teeth in the morning, they jump up in the bathroom sink and want us to turn on the water. They only drink from running water. And of course, we comply … adjusting the flow and temperature just right. Connie has held them like babies so much that they enjoy lying on their backs. When they want attention, they roll over and demand that we rub their tummies. And of course, we comply. They rub our ankles when we are in the kitchen, begging for food. And we give them some. When they want outside, their meow demands such. Their "meow" insists. And we let them out.

Cats have a way of expecting service. And by the sheer power of their expectation, they get it. Creative Prayer is something like that. Just finding in ourselves and in the universe just the right image … and resting quietly in that expectation.